Finding the Unforgiven (Sayaka and Homura in the Demon Homura World)
by thofheinz
Summary: Sayaka, without warning, joins Homura for a conversation, giving her an update on Kyoko, Madoka, Mami, Nagisa, and others that shocks Homura. All of them have all been living in an alternate universe within Homura's after learning where they are, at the same time that they live in the one Homura knows about. Sayaka ends up helping Homura and Madoka.


Homura Akemi, my former enemy, watched me carefully as I moved to her café table and sat down across from her. She looked great, primly sitting in a shoulderless jet-black glossy sheath dress cut just above the knee and a haircut that let her beautiful hair fall while sculpting it. Her black eyes tracked me as I moved, and I saw their pupils dilate when I smiled.

"Sayaka," she said politely and warily.

"Homura," I replied. "You look incredible. Where did you get that look?"

Homura blushed deeply, darkened with defensiveness, and lightened up when she realized I wasn't on the attack.

"Madoka made me do a makeover," she said. "It's a little embarrassing, frankly, but I'll do anything she tells me to do."

"Except for one thing, I would imagine," I said.

Her face clouded with sadness. "I'm open to persuasion, but it would take a lot. Everything's expendable except for her, as you know, since you're only alive because she loves you. As far as I'm concerned, I'd rather the universe burned than she feel even a trace of pain."

"Of course," I said, "if that happened, she would be destroyed from the pain."

Homura darkened with my new favorite look of hers, like a growling dog with its ears flattened back who nonetheless is looking for a way to back away.

"So," she said, "when did you figure it out?"

"About the time you let us graduate to the ninth grade," I said, smiling at her. "I don't know, maybe eight years Earth time?"

"What about the others?"

"I told them all when I found out," I said, "but they were all on the brink. None of them were surprised. In fact, Madoka said she was surprised that it took us so long to figure the whole thing out."

Homura looked miffed. "That minx."

I shrugged. "She's putting all of her energy into loving you. There's no time to throw the fact that she's still a deity into the mix."

I saw Homura lower her pride level to the point where she could ask me for information. "Since when did she know?"

"Since you failed to convince her to move into some nonexistent state of consuming desire, back in the beginning," I said. "Did it ever occur to you that she and we were already maxed out on desire and that modifying it was simply impossible because our desire had reached the saturation point?"

Homura put her face in her hands. "My God, you are such a presumptuous bitch. That didn't occur to me, no. But the only reason I created this place was because of my desire. Did you know I took us away from Earth because those little shits in Kyubey's species accidentally annihilated it?"

I leaned forward and nodded. "That's what I guessed. You managed to do a holographic grab of the whole pre-apocalyptic world minus the stuff you wanted gone, by cycling back one more time while you had the new power.

"I actually think you've done a terrific job here, now, although I don't know why you had to torment me by making me watch Hitomi and Kyosuke play kissy-face."

"Pettiness," she said, with a genuinely evil grin. "I mean, you used to be such a jerk to me. Yeah, I was kind of an insufferable Goth princess with a bottomless contempt for all of humanity except Madoka, but I tried to help all of you escape the cycles, over and over again, and you simply would not try to talk some sense into Madoka in any of them. I mean, you're her best friend. She didn't fully realize that she and I loved each other until I was ground down to nothing and pulled this stunt. Take some responsibility, anyway. Do you have any idea how jealous of you I was when Kyoko carried your dead body around in total loyalty even though you never knew she loved you, then gave you her life to release you from Octavia in an act of incredibly pure love? No one did that for me. Madoka was clueless and forgot about me, _countless times_, that beautiful little air-headed moron. If I didn't love her I'd hate her. And then to find out that Kyoko's and your souls became entwined beyond life and death after you died for her. It was less fair than almost any other thing when that happened. Really. So pull your head out, Sayaka. You gave me nothing but grief for every one of the cycles. You were such a pain."

Wow. She'd really learned how to pistol-whip with her words. It would have pissed me off if everything she had said had not been true. And those black demonic eyes were undoubtedly hurt. Of course they were, since her life as a demon emerged from hurt wholesale.

"Well, I understand," I told her. "So now I'm going to tell you some things."

Homura bristled again, and I shook my head.

"These aren't bad things," I said. "They're might be good things, as far as you're concerned. Have any questions?"

Homura studied me, her eyes narrowed. It wasn't hard to guess what she was going through. Here she had created a human universe and set the rules, and the rules seemed to be bigger than she thought.

"Okay," she said. "First, how did you get smart? I remember you as a borderline idiot."

I laughed. "Understandably. I just took a degree in Galactic Neurology with an emphasis on phase-shifting in quantum energy consciousness. Tokyo University, last year. In that layer of your world, I'm twenty-six years old."

Seemingly without meaning to, Homura made her black wings emerge a bit, rising a few inches above her shoulders.

I continued, "Kyoko is living with me in Tokyo. She's an anime producer. Agise… I don't have the slightest idea where she is, even when she's right in front of me. Mami married Kyosuke five years ago and they're both teaching music at a private academy outside Kyoto."

Homura burst out in laughter. "Give me a break! That's the stupidest thing I ever heard!"

"It is! But they're happy. It turns out that all it took for Kyosuke to become a human being was to marry a maternal, big-boobed bossy pants woman. But that's not the best piece of news. Brace yourself." I leaned forward, feeling happily wicked. "Hitomi came out as yuri before entering high school and is living with a cheerful female bus driver in Sapporo."

Homura began to laugh uncontrollably. Tears formed in her eyes and spilled down her cheeks as she giggled. "Oh my God!" she managed to choke out. "What did her family think?"

"Her mother ran off with a woman, too," I grinned. "Now her dad, who is a real bastard, isn't sure who is inheriting the family zaibatsu."

Homura literally fell off her chair laughing, gasping with pain as the laughs started to hurt. I'd never seen her like that. I grabbed my cell phone and snapped a picture as she writhed in happy agony on the ground. This would go to Madoka.

Finally, Homura, moaning and weeping as the laughter faded away, sat down again across from me, her eyes red where they were not obsidian black. "Why didn't I know this?" she asked. "Really." She grew rapidly sober. "What's going on? I haven't lost control of this place, that's for sure."

I nodded. "Oh no, don't worry. You're still the mighty demon bitch queen of this universe. You just don't completely understand your own creation."

Homura glared at me. "Okay. Tell me."

"Well," I said, "I didn't understand what was up until I got a scholarship to make sense of it at Tokyo University. Of course," I said, "I used this reality as a hypothetical scenario, just a little joke. Here's what I think. When you created this world and universe, you did what people in my discipline call a 'holographic capture', which is a global mapping of a topic, followed by a simulation and creation of reality following from the map. It's like having an idea, but under certain circumstances, like yours, what is formed is a reality rather than an idea. What happened that you didn't intend was that when you brought in Madoka and the rest of us leftover magical girls, your holoscopic comprehension of the world you control spilled over into our minds, which are basically equally powerful to yours, and we spun off our own consensual reality from yours. Part of us was here, and part of us was in the alternate reality I've been describing.

"Now, all of it is really yours. Our reality is a branching off that remains a subset to yours. It's like a room where even you can't always see the doors. That's where we've met a lot and discussed what happened and what to do. Madoka's only concern was that her former magical girl realm had been destroyed, but she visited and another version of her is ruling there. The two of them had a nice conversation. So she came back to love you and try to make you happy.

"Think about this, Homura. Why did you bring us magical girls in our whole form, rather than as simulations for Madoka's sake? Why did you keep yourself separate from Madoka when you found out she wasn't aligned with desire and destruction, making you as lonely as you were before? Most important, why did you haul the wraiths, of all things, into this picture?"

Homura stared at me, listening with absorption, without expression.

"The answer, Homura, is this world you created here — it's a beautiful day, isn't it? — is _yours and yours only_, even if it holds subsets like the one the rest of us spend most of our time in. You are emotionally incapable of not bringing into the new world those you got to know over such a terrible length of time. You don't know how to remove yourself from hellish loneliness, so you divide yourself from Madoka and us. And the wraiths? What do you think the wraiths are?"

Homura opened and closed her mouth, then leaned back in her chair and looked up at the sky. "I don't know. And I don't know why they're here. I thought maybe they were to keep me from being bored after I tortured the rest of the Kubeys to death. But that didn't make sense, since I was losing to them toward the end. And it would have made some sort of sense to search out some demons I could hang out with who shared some of my problems. But honestly, I don't know what the wraiths are. Stop teasing me. I've listened to you this far, so just tell me."

"I think they followed you through all those cycles and only appeared when they did because you were all alone and vulnerable to them. More and more appeared because the word spread interdimensionally that you were open to attack. Now that you have enormous power, you can fight them to a draw, right? But you can't defeat them, am I correct?"

Homura didn't respond as she continued to look at the sky. The gorgeous slate-blue eyes of her girlhood had returned, replacing the fathomless black of recent times, and I wondered why I had never noticed how devastatingly beautiful, and how childishly sweet, she had always been. It gave me a quick rush of sadness. It would be meaningless to say I owed Homura anything, but in a way I can't really explain, I felt at that moment deep remorse for not helping her in her struggles. I was so far from Madoka's compassion. I would work forever to be nearly as compassionate as Madoka is.

"I think that the wraiths, Homura," I said as she looked up, "are the torments of pain within you, externalized by being transformed through positive energy each time you cycled, which meant they were there in every cycle, and you could no longer run from there when you were alone. You can't run from them now because you are still hellishly alone, and I'm truly sorry for never helping you feel less so.

"And the thing is that because you're such a powerful being always at war with herself, the wraiths can't be beaten and they sometimes win."

Homura leaned forward. "Are you telling me that you think the wraiths are interdimensional energy entities mapped from my subconscious suffering?"

"Exactly," I said.

A waiter mysteriously appeared with two large, iced glasses of lemonade. I took mine, gestured 'cheers' to Homura, and drank some of the cold delicious liquid. She drank hers slowly, finishing long after me, as we sat in silence. Every particle of her body radiated yearning for release. I had never pitied anyone more in my life. Is this what Madoka saw every day in their life together, or was my somewhat dim-witted pink-clad friend still missing important cues from her fanatical, eternal lover? Were Madoka's oversights what the wraiths came from?

And that's when it hit me. The cause of this whole horrible thing became as clear in my mind as a diamond in front of a light.

"Here's my suggestion, Homura." I looked at her until she looked back, locking eyes with me. "Take me to the wraith battleground and we can test this out. I have a feeling we can make something happen to help us both understand the wraiths."

Homura and I stood on what looked like a square mile of freshly slaughtered meat. I caught myself reeling, especially when I saw the human heads and hands and feet that lay scattered around. I looked at Homura to see if she was testing me, but she wasn't. She was staring at the early dawn horizon, at an army of wraiths, writhing and almost solid in hideous shifting shapes, which clearly stared back at her. There was no sound. All the sounds were somewhere in my former enemy's mind.

"Alright," she said in a choked voice. "What do we do?"

"Try forgiving someone," I said. "Stare at the wraiths and just try to forgive someone."

Homura whipped her head around, eyes wide with outrage. "Are you out of your mind? Forgive whom? Forgive what?"

I paused, and then continued. "Try forgiving Madoka for commanding you to murder her. Start with when she made you kill her, when she left you all alone after after making you kill your beloved only friend."

Homura's face went crimson and pain rushed in. Every inch of her face looked petrified, as if frozen by tetanus, and her eyes became so wide that her eyeballs protruded.

"I can't!" she yelled. "I can't! Goddamn her, I hate her, I hate her, how could she do that to me, leaving me alone and then _forgetting _me over and over again, that horrible spoiled twit, I can't forgive her for that!"

She was hyperventilating. "Well," I said, "maybe you can try. Because at least it would be one of you. Madoka has never come close to forgiving herself for making you do the worst possible thing you could do. She has never forgiven herself for a second, Homura."

Homura sank to her knees, clutching her heart and moaning between saying, "I can't." I just stood there. Then, after quieting down, she stood up.

"What should I do?" she asked.

"Just stare straight at those wraiths, bring Madoka into your mind, and tell her that you forgive her for making you kill her. Gather up all the truth in your heart and pour it into her while looking at those things."

Homura's body suddenly projected a massive aura of orange light, loving and angry, as she stared at the wraiths while her love for Madoka twisted and radiated across her features. I turned to the wraiths and gaped, my thoughts dissolved, at the clear horizon. They were gone, wiped away. I barely caught Homura as she fell, worn out, and lowered her to the ground to rest with her head in my lap.

The ground was no longer covered with carnage, although it was a sand desert. It was only a place now, not a nightmare.

Above it the radiant blue sky bore huge white cumulus clouds.

Love sang out in an open universe.

END


End file.
